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Contributors
HEATH ADAM ACKLEY is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of California, Irvine and a Christian pacifist ordained in the Church of the Brethren. Trained in the philosophy of religion and theology, Professor Ackley has published widely in gender and religion, Wesleyan theology, and environmental ethics. He is the author of Women, Music and Faith in Central Appalachia (Edwin Mellen P, 2001) and the forthcoming books, Manning Up (Transgress Press) and Daughters of the Mountain South (Ohio University).
REBECCA T. ALPERT is Professor of Religion at Temple University. She attended Barnard College before receiving her PhD in Religion at Temple University and her rabbinical training at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. She is the co-author of Exploring Judaism: A Reconstructionist Approach (Reconstructionist Press, 1985) and author of Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition (Columbia UP, 1997) and Whose Torah? A Concise Guide to Progressive Judaism (New Press, 2008) as well as several edited volumes and numerous articles. Her specialization is religion in America with a focus on sexuality and race. She has recently taught courses on religion in American public life: Jews, America and sports, and sexuality in world religions. Her most recent work is Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (Oxford UP, 2011). She is currently at work on a case study textbook on religion and sport for Columbia University Press.
MICHAEL J. ALTMAN is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama where he teaches courses on religion and conflict, colonialism, American religious history, and theory and method in the study of religion. His research focuses on the construction of religion through encounters between the West and its others. He is completing a book titled “From Heathens to Hindus: Religious Difference in Protestant America,” that analyzes the history of American encounters with Hindus in the nineteenth century. Altman is also the co-founder and Managing Editor of Sacred Matters: Religious Currents in Culture, a web magazine that brings scholarly analysis of religion and culture to a general audience, and is a monthly contributor to the Religion in American History Blog.
STEVE BENZEK is a gis Developer and cartographer for the Army Geospatial Center of the US Army Corps of Engineers in Alexandria, VA. His projects include the Overseas Humanitarian Assistance Shared Information System for managing and analyzing worldwide humanitarian programs, and creating and managing web-based mapping applications to [End Page 161] visualize and analyze cultural data. In 2008, he completed the ms gis program at the University of Redlands, where his major individual project was a tool to analyze the geography of ancient texts. His maps have been recognized at conferences of the Association of American Geographers and Esri (GIS software) and have been published by the US Government and in Esri Map Books. He also holds a BA in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, an mba from Marymount University in Arlington, VA, and has been an Assistant Adjunct Professor
CANDY GUNTHER BROWN has a PhD from Harvard University and is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University. She is the author of The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880 (U of North Carolina P, 2004); Testing Prayer: Science and Healing (Harvard UP, 2012); and The Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America (Oxford UP, 2013). She is editor of Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing (Oxford UP, 2011) and coeditor, with Mark Silk, of The Future of Evangelicalism in America (Columbia UP, forthcoming). Her teaching honors include the John Clive Teaching Prize from Harvard University, and an Outstanding Junior Faculty Award and a Trustees’ Teaching Award from Indiana University.
XIELO LUNA CORA currently attends All Saints Academy in Bayonne, NJ where she recently received an award for her psychological experiment “Color Connections.” It explores the relationship between colors, the emotions they evoke and how they can assist in the process of memorization. One of her short animated films was showcased at the Newark Museum. Her artwork has been exhibited at Bayonne Public Library. On a regular day, Xielo cuts out words from magazines: dance, all you need is…, love, peace, photography, believe, girls vs. boys, happy, togetherness, pastes them among her photos and cutout images from periodicals, takes an iphone photo, and posts it on Instagram. Xielo is 13 years old.
RACHEL GROSS is a PhD candidate in Religion at Princeton University and a dissertation research fellow at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis from 2013–2014. Her dissertation, “Objects of Affection: The Material Religion of American Jewish Nostalgia,” is a material culture and ethnographic examination of nostalgia for American Jewish communal pasts, including studies of Jewish genealogists, the use of historic synagogues as museums, children’s books and dolls, and American Jewish commercial foodways, including kosher-style delis and food trucks.
JAMES F. HAMILTON is an Associate Professor in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. His teaching honors include being appointed to a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching [End Page 162] Professorship, the most prestigious teaching honor at his university. Jay teaches courses in cultural, critical and historical approaches to media and communication; communications technologies and society; media and consumer society; graphic communication and creative industries. His research focuses on problems of alternative media and democratic communications in the current era of digital media, globalization, and perpetual political, economic, and ecological crises. In addition to numerous articles published in scholarly journals, Hamilton’s work includes Democratic Communications; Formations, Projects, Possibilities (Lexington, 2009) and, co-authored with Chris Atton, Alternative Journalism (Sage, 2009).
HEATHER N. HILL received a PhD in English (composition and rhetoric) at the University of Washington and is currently an assistant professor at Cedarville University where she teaches courses in writing and linguistics. Her areas of expertise include composition theory and pedagogy, rhetorical genre studies, and theories of knowledge transfer. Her recent research includes investigations of the integration of faith and learning, and studies of the role of writing centers in the facilitation of knowledge transfer.
JOY LADIN is David and Ruth Gottesman Professor of English at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University and Director of the Beren Writing Center. She specializes in American poetry, creative writing, and expository writing. She has recently joined a growing group of scholars working on the intersection of religion and trans* identity, trans* poetry, and trans* poetics. Joy is the author of Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders (U of Wisconsin P, 2013), a memoir of her transition that was a finalist for a 2012 National Jewish Book Award, and Soldering the Abyss: Emily Dickinson and Modern American Poetry. She has also published six books of poetry.
LILLIAN LARSEN is an Associate Professor of Early Christianity at the University of Redlands in Southern California. She is also one of the core researchers in the “Early Monasticism and Classical Paideia” project at Lund University in Sweden. Lillian holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Columbia University in New York City, alongside Masters degrees in Education, Theology, and Divinity. Her ongoing research focuses on re-imagining the place accorded education in early monastic life and practice. Complementary investigation has concentrated on leveraging the digital tools of geographic information systems in re-examining conventional configurations of early Christian and monastic narrative landscapes.
LINCOLN MULLEN is a historian of American religions. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Brandeis University, finishing a dissertation titled, “The Varieties of Religious Conversion: The Origins of Religious Choice in the United States.” [End Page 163]
CAMERON PARTRIDGE is a scholar of pre-modern Christian thought. He is also an Episcopal Priest who serves as the Episcopal Chaplain at Boston University and the denominational counselor for Episcopal and Anglican students at Harvard Divinity School. He occasionally teaches courses at Harvard Divinity School and for the Women, Gender, and Sexuality program at Harvard University.
BRENDAN RANDALL is an advanced doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (hgse), studying religion, law and education, and a Senior Research Associate for the Pluralism Project at Harvard University. He also has a JD from the University of Minnesota Law School, a MEd from hgse, and an mts from Harvard Divinity School. He is interested in how educators can better prepare students for citizenship in a religiously diverse democratic society. His doctoral research concerns religiously-motivated student speech on controversial social issues. Before returning to graduate school, he taught history, applied ethics, and comparative religion at the Emma Willard School, an independent, all-girls boarding school.
MELIDA RODAS revisits an elephant from her childhood, Mocosita, in her latest multimedia body of work: ELEFANTE, which confronts the plight of elephants and paradox of their situation. Melida is a teacher, writer and multimedia artist whose work has appeared in anthologies from publishers such as Oxford University Press, Pearson, and the Feminist Press. In 2013 she was chosen by Mayor Steve Fulop, as Jersey City’s first inaugural poet. She is a grant recipient from PROARTS for her eco-friendly work, “Illuminations ~ Words for Change,” promoting unity, poetry and art by projecting images and words onto the urban landscape.
ERIN A. SMITH is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-and twentieth-century American literature, culture, and gender studies. She is the author of Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines (Temple UP, 2000) and the forthcoming What Would Jesus Read?: Scenes of Religious Reading and Writing in Twentieth-Century America (U of North Carolina P, 2015).
KRISTI UPSON-SAIA is Associate Professor of Religion at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Specializing in early Christian history, she has published two books—one monograph Early Christian Dress: Gender, Virtue, and Authority (Routledge, 2011) and one edited volume Dressing Judeans and Christianity in Antiquity (Ashgate, 2014)—on how dress in late antiquity expressed and complicated religious identity. Recently, she has been working on late ancient discussions of bodily deformities and on a monograph that explores how ideas from early Christian apocryphal literature persist in Catholic tradition. With respect to pedagogical scholarship, Upson-Saia [End Page 164] has published essays on the capstone experience in the field of Religious Studies and on the use of the iPad in the writing classroom.
RACHEL WAGNER is Associate Professor of Religion at Ithaca College. She has published widely on religion and film, religion and culture, and religion and virtual reality. Her book, Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality (Routledge, 2011), explores how our fascination with all things virtual reveals our desire for new rituals and new modes of world building. She is currently Co-Chair of the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group of the American Academy of Religion. [End Page 165]
